Region II Meeting

9/22/17 SUNY Geneseo

Attendees:

Name / School
Chris Vernam / Alfred State
Cindy Kohlman / Inceptia
Tami Gilbeaux / Inceptia
Jeffrey Ferrara / MCC
Sylvia Mendez / MCC
Sandy Killeen / Nazareth College
Deidre Strutz / RIT
Scott Atkinson / SUNY Brockport
Jon Heininger / SUNY Geneseo
Megan Kennerknecht / SUNY Geneseo
BJ Revill / UR Med
Margaret Christian / UR Med

Regional Business:

Co-chair Report:

High School Counselor and Support Staff workshop plans – we put in a budget proposal to NYSFAAA as this event is no longer HESC sponsored. It will be a region event. We asked for $3500 from NYSFAAA. We need people to volunteer to work with Megan and Deidre. We will also need donations of pens and folders. Need gifts for giveaways. We need a committee for the Support Staff workshop. Currently Scott, Sue, Joe B, and Christian but need more people. 4 years ago was the last workshop. RIT is a thought for a location as the food there is not too expensive with all the vendors and catering they have. $10 would be min fee, possibly more per attendee.

About 100 people may attend the High School Counselor workshop. The last time we had this event, it was at Nazareth toward the end of November. This time of years seems to be good as counselors would have specific questions about STEM, AIMS, FAFSA, Excelsior, etc. It would be a half day event, usually 8:00 to 1:00. Cost vs location is an issue. Cost would be covered but that could affect where we can have it. Sandy and Christian are involved on the committee.

Membership – 88 members for 1718 so far. 64 members have not renewed yet. This should push up after the conference. We had 129 members last year. We need to push to get members from your school if they are not members yet.

At Novice training, region II has 20 members which were the most for any region.

Region II Meeting plans:

October meeting – no meeting due to statewide conference. We had looked into bus service but it was too expensive, 3 companies evaluated.

Would someone be able to provide a briefing to other members who couldn’t go about some of the major issues that were discussed?

November – Statewide training. Host needed (update – GCC is the location). 2 way communication for webinar needed due to Q & A.

December – holiday meeting. Location TBD.

Joint meeting with Region I – would be March 16th or April 27th whichever works best. Stay tuned.

Treasurer report – We have a balance of $1922.62 according to Scott. We have the lowest balance in our treasury of any region. Other regions have $5K or more. Possibly due to more revenue sharing or fewer meetings?

Margaret asked if we could get a report of incoming revenue and outgoing expenses.

Secretary Report – April 2017 meeting minutes are posted.

Exec Council – 2 exec council meetings after we had our June Meeting at Dave and Busters that was on June 16th. They were June 19th and 20th at Tarrytown. There was a remote meeting held on August 16th

Next meeting is October 9th in Tarrytown.

Novice Training – we had 85 participants. They did flash drives or google docs for the manual. They are looking for a host for the 2018 Novice Training.

NYSFAAA conference 2018 – Next year’s conference will be the 50th anniversary of NYSFAAA and will be held at the Marriott in Syracuse on Oct 23rd to 25th. Gena Salise at Colgate, Kathy Flaherty at Oswego, and Tami Gilbeaux are on the committee. BJ was asked to help with the grad symposium. They are looking for suggestions for a keynote speaker. Also looking for any NYSFAAA founders who are still alive (Cindy requested). We heard that the agenda for the first conference is around somewhere?

Long range plan – review will be done in April for the 2017-2018 year. This date was moved up so as to address issues while the year is still going on. 1617 was the last year of the long range plan.

Vendors – Tami at Inceptia – they offer verification services (full service and stand-alone). They are an approved partner of Elucian. They also have a Sat Prog tool and PJ tool.

New business

College nights – Mall events will be September 27th at Marketplace and September 28th at Greece Ridge. Both will be from 6:00 to 8:30. Shalena Clary and Christina Schmidt will be at Marketplace, Tom from Brockport will be at Greece Ridge. We need more volunteers.

College goal – this is now a part of FAFSA Fest. RCAN and College Goal have partnered.

RCAN events – 11/2 Rochester Education Opportunity Center, 12/2 at Franklin HS (12 to 2:00), 1/13 East HS (11:00 to 1:00), 2/13 Rochester Education Opportunity Center (5:00 to 7:00) located at 161 Chestnut Street, and 3/13 at MCC Downtown (12 to 2:00)

At EASFAA, Jeff Baker gave his last report. He has retired this past July. NYS default rate dropped from 8.2% to 8%. Christine Jovell is new EASFAA president. Wants to grow membership to 700 members (currently about 500). Amy Connors and Nancy Teudecki are Mentoring Committee co-chairs.

Howard Leslie reported that there were 5909 member attendees for last year’s webinars. The early FAFSA was the largest attended at about 3000.

Excelsior discussion – We have until December 31st to certify credits. Challenges we face - Returning students are challenging financial aid offices especially with respect to being eligible based on credits. We certify so we get blamed. They also can’t understand why Excelsior can’t be in addition to TAP and Pell. Brockport decided to send out warning letters about credits. We have counseled students to take 12 credits instead of 15 due to rigors of classes, especially when they are coming right after high school. Jerome at MCC is holding meetings with faculty. Brockport is getting sued over the credit hour issue as a student was counseled to take 12 credits due to health issues and is now short of the credits she needs to qualify. How can they make up credits after they drop a class?

Christian brought up that he can’t get work done because he is on the phone so much. Asks, “How do you address phone coverage?” Other offices noted that they use peer counselors to answer the phone or other offices on campus step in during peek periods.

Discussion Topic – Office Assessment

Megan – How do you know what you are doing is effective? How do you benchmark? What do you benchmark? How do you measure?

Putting together assessment reports helps to get resources as you evaluate programs and processes and provide measurements. Could be used as an assessment for additional staffing.

Scott says his VP is the assessment guru. Scott sent Megan a document which lays out some things they do. Includes a mission statement and goals. This is how they get their resources so the pain in getting it put together is worthwhile. They do focus groups and surveys (e.g. they looked at COA and what the costs are for various living situations) to help assess what they do. They cut their budget appeals from 73 to 32 because they now require students to do a budget assessment first. Found that lots of students saw that their costs were not higher than COA, they just needed more resources to meet their costs. His report and process was spurred on by Middle States.

Geneseo – every division has to have an assessment plan tied to the strategic plan. We looked at the strategic plan and found where our office would be involved. We are in the “Access and Success” part of the Strategic Plan. We have not done any benchmarking or tracking yet.

Sylvia – They require R2T4 students to come to aid office before withdrawal as sometimes it can be a resources issue that is forcing withdrawal. They don’t add loans for EOP students until they talk to their EOP counselor first. They found that the borrowing of sub dropped from 134 students to 88.